A Grammy award-winning audio book producer/director celebrates the most incredible instrument of all:
the human voice.

Paul Alan Ruben

Monday, July 16, 2012

To Prep Or Not to Prep? That Is The Question: but perhaps not the relevant one

Several weeks ago the
proposition - should narrators ‘prep’ their book before recording – surprisingly (from my perspective) provoked a flurry of divergent opinions
among a dozen or so Audio Book Crowd participants.

Why surprisingly? As a
director/producer, I imagine querying a narrator soliciting employment:

Really,
I’d be thinking: Hire you? Ah, no thanks. But I will have the vegetable plate.

Grover Gardner (Studio
Director for Blackstone Audio in Ashland, Oregon and an award winning narrator)
spoke succinctly for me when he unequivocally urged narrators to ‘prep’ before
entering the booth. I’d echo Grover’s instructive advice for what seems to me
to be the obvious: There is an axiomatic relationship between preparation and
confident storytelling.

If it’s fair to argue
that prepping the book is a must (Is there really a downside to confidently
knowing what you’re talking about in advance of saying it?) the emerging
salient concern for narrators, and the thesis of this post, is: What exactly
should the narrator be prepping? Additionally, what’s preppable, what isn’t
and, importantly, what shouldn’t be prepped (because some prep may be hazardous
to the listener’s experience).

M-W defines
preparation as: “The action or process of making something ready for
use…getting ready for some occasion.” Let’s localize this definition by
determining how it applies to (cover your eyes, Aunt Mary) the narrator, or, to
substitute my preferred nomenclature (an aesthetic, and more accurate and
respectful characterization of this performance artist) the storyteller.

The Prepping Process:

Sort of like Spock’s
mind meld, as storytellers read the book in advance their purpose is to emotionally engagethe subtext so that when they enter the booth to record they can
confidently tell the story because they’ve already been in touch with what’s
coming emotionally. And the more confident the storyteller the more opportunity
he or she has to accurately reveal the subtext’s emotional nuance.

So, ifemotionally engaging the subtext is the
process (which I’ll discuss further), what, ultimately, does the process seek
to accomplish? My answer: Connecting the narrative’s emotionality to the
listener. That’s the storyteller’s bottom line: evoking listeners’ willing
suspension of disbelief so they can uninterruptedly be emotionally involved
with the story as if it’s happening in real time.

The Process: defining,
locating and actualizing the subtext

The storyteller
understands subtext. Still, it always feels useful to briefly define it in
advance of prescriptively suggesting where to locate subtext, and then how to
‘prep’ it.

The author’s words –
the text - are not actable because their sole preoccupation is intellectual,
that is, meaning. So, looking through a performance lens, a word or a sentence
is not, itself, actable. The word becomes actable only when its subtext (its feeling,
its emotional consequence) is construed. As storytellers prep the book, what
they are actually doing is discovering and engaging the feeling and the emotional consequence that is embedded in every single one of the author’s words
so they can confidently reveal those feelings during the recording.

Simply stated: Subtext
is preppable. Text isn’t. Try, as a storyteller, to get a handle on how to say
“She eats carrots” without first investigating their emotional intention. Impossible.

To be sure, it is
important for storytellers to intellectually grasp the text, to literally get
what’s going on in both fiction and non-fiction, to know who are the good guys,
the bad guys, and to generally understand the intellectual issues the author
may be posing and/or grappling with. But intellectual acuity is, from a
performance point of view, the low hanging, tasteless fruit. Why? Because, as
I’ve suggested, you can’t act intellect. At the risk of redundancy it’s
important for the storyteller to remember that, strictly speaking, just because
he understands the Civil War better than anyone doesn’t mean he can
compellingly tell its story. Authors who read their own work are living
examples of why, if they value storytelling, they’ll always leave their book to
a storyteller.

If it’s fair to
suggest that acting is largely intuitive, as narrators prep the book, they must
intuitively focus their eyes, as if they are dual X-ray ovals, on the ‘feeling’
(subtext) buried inside the syntax. And feeling is buried there, under each and
every word, oscillating unhappily, as if it were a lonely, fallow soul,
anxiously waiting to be discovered and plucked from inside the (non-actable)
syntax, so that it can intentionalize the words with its emotional consequence.

As their eyes pass
over the narrative, it is every storyteller’s task to reflexively ask: What’s
this character feeling (not thinking)? What are the emotional stakes? And then,
as only an intuitive performer can, the storyteller must inhabit and engage
that feeling with the sole purpose of vocally transferring it, as the author’s conduit,
to the listener.

Until the subtext has
been identified (happy, sad, morose, elated, etc.), engaged, and internalized,
there is no opportunity to liberate that emotionality and then deliver
feeling’s consequence to the listener.

Prep Hazard

Narrators who prep the
book by underlining or highlighting or drawing curvy lines above words and
phrases for the purpose of remembering to emphasize them may, albeit unintentionally,
aesthetically compromise their best intentions, sometimes damagingly so.
Why? Because emphasis that occurs non-organically (that is, when it’s not the
result of in-the-moment sub textual revelation) is an emotional disconnector,
the dead opposite of what the storyteller wants to create.

I would argue that
narrators who are intent on engendering interest by vocally
imposing emphasis or modulation, risk the unintended consequence of compromising their emotional connection to the listener. If severing willing suspension of
disbelief, removing listeners from the narrative’s emotional consequence - as
if it were occurring right now - is the outcome, all that’s necessary is to
vocally Aunt Mary the words, that is, impose emphasis. Non-organic emphasis may
catch the listener’s attention but only because he or she has disconnected
emotionally in order to intellectually consider what should be felt.

Process, it seems to
me, is meaningful when it dutifully serves its correctlyunderstood outcome. If prep’s outcome is
emotionally connecting the listener to the narrative, then, like Spock, the
subtext meld should be the storyteller’s primary 'prep' objective while reading the
book in advance of recording.

///

Over the past month I’ve
enjoyed working with Tony Danza, Andrew McCarthy and, on a separate multi-cast recording, a group of talented
storytellers, including: Eliza
Foss, Vinnie Penna, Carol Monda, Richard Ferrone, Cynthia Darlow, Emma
Galvin and... more to come on the next post.

I’m also looking forward to upcoming narrator
workshops in New York, San Francisco and Atlanta (www.tribecaaudio for details), to completing
a non-fiction memoir (Hairpin Turn:
Raising Myself Through My Son’s Teenage Years) and beginning a
low-residence fiction MFA program (which will allow me to write at home while
continuing to direct and produce audiobooks) in November.

Wow! I've never realized this so clearly as when you explained it above: "Non-organic emphasis may catch the listener’s attention but only because he or she has disconnected emotionally in order to intellectually consider what should be felt."

I've always felt "bad" if I didn't prepare a script in it's entirety, now - I don't! I've got the gift of being able to read with feeling (with few mistakes) right from the page. I just experienced my longest project (an iPhone app for a National Park) & it's been an interesting ride for sure.

Thanks for your wisdom Paul. And thanks for the terrific input in the long conversation we had on the LinkedIn Audiobook Voices group. Having folks like you to learn from makes resources like that group and your blog so valuable to us in the trenches.

About Me

Paul Ruben has produced and directed award-winning audio books for every major publisher since 1987.
Grammy awards (Best Spoken Word Album) include: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (2003) written and narrated by Al Franken; Always Looking Up (2009), written and narrated by Michael J. Fox. Industry Audie awards include: It’s Not About the Bike (Narrator: Oliver Wyman), Raymond and Hannah (multi-cast featuring David LeDoux/Kathleen McInerney), The World is Flat (Narrator: Oliver Wyman), A Slight Trick of the Mind (Narrator: Simon Jones).
Paul has a B.A. degree in Theatre and Philosophy (Yankton College), an MA in theatre (Bowling Green State U.), and has directed numerous regional and summer theatre productions. He has contributed feature articles on audio book narration to Audiofile Magazine. In 2005 Paul was elected to the Audio Publishers Association Board of Directors. He currently teaches narration to professional talent. For more information visit: www.tribecaaudio.com